With the progress of society and the development of technology, the scope of the people's activities becomes more and more increasing and uncertain. The mobility and uncertainty take market opportunity as well as challenges to mobile communications, but at the same time provide unlimited business opportunities for developing and expanding the location based services.
This so-called location-based services (LBS), also known as locating services, is to determine the mobile user's actual geographical location via coordination between the mobile terminal and the mobile network, and to provide the appropriate location-based service information for the mobile user. It is a value-added mobile communication and navigation integrated service mode using the user's location information. Geographic Information System (GIS) plays an extremely important role in the technology of processing the “location”.
A location service based mobile geographic information system (MGIS) uses a handheld apparatus, for example, a Portable Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or a mobile phones as the basic hardware platform, and uses micro satellite GPS system and the embedded technology to build the MGIS environment, which can be used to develop particular applications according to characteristics of an industry. There are a variety of optional technologies for discovering a mobile target's location, including solutions based on the network (base station information), solutions based on mobile phones (WIFI information), and solutions based on Global Positioning System (GPS). In general, the positioning accuracy of the position coordinates may be within 800 m for base station information, within 50 m for WIFI information, and even more accurate for the GPS information.
The above solutions for current LBS are separately used for different application scenarios. However, in practical applications, a single base station or WIFI and/or GPS location-based information service solution has the following problems:
Firstly, positioning is not accurate. For the LBS based on telecommunications base stations, the positioning error is relatively large, and the success rate of positioning is relatively low.
Secondly, the location description is not clear. The position's text description is stiff and not humanized for non-graphical (map) application scenes. Traditional mobile phone positioning is based on the base station information, and the accuracy of the base station information is 800 m. If a specific and detailed place name is provided to the user, such as a certain building, and/or a certain residential community, the user may think that it is incorrect. For example, if the user is near the Zhongguancun (a district), and if the location is described as “Hilon Electronics Market” (a building), the user in the “Pacific electronics market” (another building) may think it is incorrect. But if the location is described as “Zhongguancun”, the user may feel better. This is, with the positions determined with different accuracies, different scope descriptions should be used. Due to high accuracy of WIFI positioning, it would be more accurate for the specific position. For the base station positioning, the location information corresponding to the accuracy of the base station information should be provided in order to meet the user's positioning needs.
In addition, nearby information lacks specificity. Current nearby POIs (points of interest) searching service only pushes information based on the geographical location distance, but does not analyze the user's interests based on the degree of the attention. Therefore, it is lacking specificity.
Therefore, to improve the precision, friendliness and applicability of user-oriented location information services, a better solution is needed to provide precise location-based information services for mobile terminal users.